Bad experience on selfhosting nextcloud
from foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 20 Nov 21:59
https://lemmy.ml/post/39256587

Am I the only one here that got really bad experience with nextcloud and didn’t figured how to make it work correctly?

I’m talking about painfully slow login pages, ages to show files, even upgraded hardware with disk entirely capable of saturing full gig network connection and still…
Getting only about ~30ish MB/s when downloading from nextcloud.
Incredly slow document loading with collabora…

Even if my hardware is not new-gen, a app like immich works flawlessly and loads everything instantly.
Is it the fault of next cloud or am I doing something wrong?
Are alternatives like seafile or openCloud better?

Willing your help fellow selfhosters

#selfhosted

threaded - newest

roofuskit@lemmy.world on 20 Nov 22:06 next collapse

How did you set it up? All in one, separate database and redis?

foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml on 20 Nov 22:22 collapse

Native install.
Redis installed on the network and accessed by nextcloud.
Separate database on host.

EDIT : formating

Dave@lemmy.nz on 21 Nov 02:21 collapse

I highly recommend spinning up a Nextcloud AIO instance. It’s the recommended and supported method, and it will likely run a lot nicer because all the database, redis, etc tweaking are done for you in a known good setup.

If you try that and it’s still no good, then OCIS might be worth trying depending on exactly what you are trying to achieve.

immobile7801@piefed.social on 21 Nov 03:34 collapse

Agreed, this is what I run after using seafile for a couple years.

sorghum@sh.itjust.works on 20 Nov 22:15 next collapse

No, I’ve been trying to get my instance working again with cloudflare tunnel. It was working, then broke and their support forums have been useless. I’m currently looking for a solution to have a self hosted calendar that is publicly available via web for people to view.

If anyone has any recommendations, please send them my way.

Cyber@feddit.uk on 20 Nov 23:17 collapse

I think you’re looking for a calendar on a web page?

So, probably not what you meant, but Radicale is a really good caldav server I use for our calendars

It’s a server, you need clients (ie phones, etc) to see the calendars, but I found that no-one wanted a web calendar, they just used their phones… so maybe it’s an option…?

sorghum@sh.itjust.works on 21 Nov 07:00 collapse

Yeah, I have a Radicale server running as I’m trying to see what I can do with Opencloud, but for ease for everyone to see the calendar, something hosted to view the calendar via web browser would be great. It’s such a shame that the most fragile thing in the world is Nextcloud behind a proxy of some sort. My problem is that the Apache container is refusing to communicate with cloudflare tunnel. If I point the tunnel to the AIO master container, it works flawless as far as getting to the container management web page.

dbkblk@lemmy.world on 20 Nov 22:36 next collapse

I had tried in the past and optimized the hell out of it, but I found that’s a really slow software. I appreciate the features, but it looks like they have made a really bad foundation, and built some nice features upon it. Seafile is WAY better performance wise! (but less features). Depending on your needs, the best middleground I’ve found is syncthing between my PC and sftpgo to expose webdav / sftp. There is no lighter setup than that.

Lem453@lemmy.ca on 20 Nov 22:58 next collapse

I ran nextcloud for years on good hardware and its always been the weakest self hosted app I have. I moved to seafile for a bit and then ultimately owncloud OCIS.

OCIS is a modern app that is massively better since its written with modern languages / frameworks

uninvitedguest@piefed.ca on 20 Nov 23:12 collapse

I’m one of the people who is happy with my Nextcloud setup (outside of never quite getting only office to work in browser after I hooked it all up to a reverse proxy behind HTTPS), but I always try to keep my eye on developments in the space for a potential better solution. I looked at OCIS a while back, but it didn’t have the quality of life features that I enjoy to make it worth me switching from a working Nextcloud deployment.

Does OCIS have a desktop client that supports on-demand file synchronization (a la OneDrive) rather than just selective folder sync? Does it support storing files as is in a natural directory structure or is everything stored as a flat file blob? Is it able to handle external storage even if that external storage is physical storage on a container mount point?

ikidd@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 06:46 collapse

Owncloud is an enshittified mess. There are very good reasons that Nextcloud hardforked and ran. Stay far away.

cecilkorik@lemmy.ca on 20 Nov 23:07 next collapse

Nextcloud is just really slow. It is what it is, I don’t use it for any things that are huge, numerous, or need speed. For that I use SyncThing or something even more specialized depending on what exactly I’m trying to do.

Nextcloud is just my easy and convenient little dropbox, and I treat it like it’s an oldschool free dropbox with limited space that’s going to nag me to upgrade if I put too much stuff in it. It won’t nag me to upgrade, but it will get slow. So I just don’t stress it out. So I only use it to store little convenience things that I want easy access to on all my machines without any fuss. For documents and “home directory” and syncing my calendars and stuff like that it’s great and serves the purpose.

I haven’t used Seafile. Features sound good, minus the AI buzzword soup, but it looks a little too corporate-enterprisey for me, with minimal commitment to open source and no actual link to anything open source on their website, I don’t doubt that it exists, somewhere, but that raises red flags for potential future (if not in-progress) enshittification to me. After eventually finding their github repo (with no help from them) I finally found a link to build instructions and… it’s a broken link. They don’t seem to actually be looking for contributions or they’re just going through the motions. Open source “community” is clearly not the target audience for their “community edition”, not really.

I’ll stick to SyncThing.

Ooops@feddit.org on 20 Nov 23:30 next collapse

Nectcloud has always been incredible slow for me. (And that’s beside other issues like updates failing more often than succeeding…)

And as I was using it mostly for basic filesharing between my machines and as a CalDAV/CardDAV server I replaced it with Syncthing and Radicale now.

czardestructo@lemmy.world on 20 Nov 23:40 next collapse

My install is bare metal, all SSD, redis and php-fpm optimization and I’m extremely happy with the performance. Also use transcoding from an Intel a380 and use Memories for the whole family. Works snappy and flawless. You need to tweak the php settings.

tenchiken@anarchist.nexus on 21 Nov 00:13 next collapse

Seeing most of the negative comments here noting bare metal etc.

Moving to the AIO build solved literally every issue I had with the single exception being the colabora office stuff.

For the image stuff, basic file, download etc… been great.

The Android app gives me grief, but I suspect that’s my janky Samsung phone killing it’s permissions.

Considering they only officially support the AIO, it’s worth trying that out before passing full judgement. It has flaws, for sure, but it’s immensely complex and the AIO nullifies many of the variables that they can’t otherwise account for easily.

Dave@lemmy.nz on 21 Nov 02:19 collapse

I’m also here on AIO with a great experience. It’s snappy and the website loads faster than Onedrive ever did.

I had a docker install prior to AIO being available, and there was a lot of tweaking to get it running nicely (though it did run nicely). AIO takes care of it all for you.

sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 21 Nov 11:58 collapse

I started off with nextcloud on bare metal on my Raspberry Pi and there was a lot that I could never configure quite right on the server side of things. Stuff like getting the right memory usage dialed in for the web server. I moved to NextCloudPi and it solved a lot of those problems for me. But it looks like the maintainer is not wanting to maintain it forever.

Someday, I will migrate to nextcloud AIO, but I’m not looking forward to the migration.

hperrin@lemmy.ca on 21 Nov 00:31 next collapse

Nextcloud is pretty slow in general, but what you’re describing sounds unusual.

For one thing, Nextcloud is written in PHP, so it sets up and tears down its environment for every single request. But PHP has drastically improved over the years, so it’s not that far behind something like Node.

Facebook was originally written in PHP for the Zend engine, and since it was so slow, they forked (or more accurately, reimplemented) it to make HHVM.

Nextcloud still runs on the Zend engine.

scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech on 21 Nov 00:38 next collapse

It’s out of date, and in desperate need of a rewrite. PHP might have been an okay choice 15 years ago, but no one in their right mind should be using PHP for modern server development. (Yes I’m calling out Pixelfed too). With so many languages and frameworks, that’s probably one of the worst right now.

Then it was proven that they don’t really get modern infrastructure either, as their docker containers depend on stateful code, with combinations of environment variables and php files that need to be stored in volumes, and then plugins which are also stateful - meaning that on new updates they need to go through an “update” process. This is directly opposite of good practice as docker containers should be 100% immutable and be able to run just by using docker run. They also have required volume mounts scattered throughout the OS, it was just never designed with containers in mind.

I can’t recommend nextcloud right now, it’s incredibly brittle and slow.

Pika@sh.itjust.works on 21 Nov 02:34 next collapse

you arent the only one. I had suck a painful onboarding process with next cloud from the docker setup to the speed of it to the UI that I just gave up and decided to use a combination of immich and syncthing instead.

igorette@lemmy.ml on 21 Nov 03:34 next collapse

Maybe you want to try github.com/kd2org/karadav

foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml on 21 Nov 06:11 collapse

It is not really what I was searching for

plm00@lemmy.ml on 21 Nov 03:46 next collapse

Speeds weren’t too bad for me, but setting it up was a pain. Even when AIO came out, I spent hours trying to get it right. After several years and tearing it down and rebuilding now and again because something would get messed up, and realizing it was nearly impossible to get it to work with Tailscale instead of a reverse proxy, I decided it was time to throw in the towel. Nextcloud parades itself as a product anyone can use, but in practice it feels like it was meant for enterprise users.

chillpanzee@lemmy.ml on 21 Nov 04:32 next collapse

I installed AIO on an old machine (retired gaming PC) a few months ago. I use NC notes and file sharing, and have disabled other services I don’t need. It’s running behind a proxy server. It’s worked fine so far. I use Immich for photos though, not Nextcloud. I heard a lot of gripes about Nextcloud for photos.

oyzmo@lemmy.world on 21 Nov 05:09 next collapse

I tried to get it working with calibra office, but gave up 🙈and do agree that it is one of the more difficult programs to setup on a server.

spacelord@sh.itjust.works on 21 Nov 06:39 next collapse

Never had issues setting up Nextcloud with Podman, but on 3 occasions I tried to integrate OnlyOffice with it and couldn’t get it to work.

In the end, I simply dropped both of them because the whole idea was to have an editor with it. I decided to go with the approach where I use Syncthing to sync my documents folder to multiple machines and my phone, and edit using LibreOffice on each machine.

filcuk@lemmy.zip on 21 Nov 07:19 collapse

I remember OO was incredibly painful to get running. When I finally managed, I just tore down the whole thing and never looked back.

otacon239@lemmy.world on 21 Nov 07:05 next collapse

I constantly would get files stuck in the database that I couldn’t delete. All of the forum posts would talk about going into the database to fix it, but the whole point of NextCloud for me was to completely avoid database management.

I’ve fallen back to using DUFS or copyparty for most things since I really just needed my file store to be browsable via web in some cases.

I probably would still be using NextCloud if they didn’t obfuscate the file system.

ikidd@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 06:54 collapse

They don’t obfuscate the filesystem, it’s right there in clear folder trees under each username in the chosen data folder with all the filenames you see in the UI, you can do whatever you want with it.

I hear this bullshit constantly and I go back to check just to make sure I’m not fooling myself and there it is. Where do people get this from, do you not know how to navigate a filesystem?

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f11b6108-6836-4de3-9395-24e27d1517ec.png">

otacon239@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 07:03 collapse

It’s been a long while since I used it and at one point I did figure out how to browse it, but I remember documentation pointing out that it’s meant to be left alone and do all your file management through NextCloud itself.

Sometimes I needed to do big file operations or drop in a chunk of data straight from the server, but it wouldn’t ingest those files unless I did a sync or upload them using the client.

Maybe things have changed, but last I used it, it was 14 services that were all sort of good when I needed the service to do one thing really well.

mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud on 21 Nov 07:44 next collapse

Your issue could be a missing index, check the admin settings page and see if it has any advice.

I also found that my files_cache table was missing an index from way back, I had to empty the table and create the index. But the speed boost was insane, it went from painfully slow to almost instant.

cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml on 21 Nov 09:45 next collapse

I’ve been running tge AIO container for several years now and it is running perfectly fine. I only enable whatever I use, so for instance no Collabora.

But for Collabora, while it should be good for single-person use, if you require some kind of collaborative simultaneous work, you should probably set up the high-performance backend. I did this at work for a NC-instance hosted via Hetzner and it works well when we tried it, but we don’t really use those kinds of tools much in our daily work.

Smash@lemmy.self-hosted.site on 21 Nov 19:47 collapse

Sounds like a DB problem. I had to re-create mine earlier this year because it got corrupted somehow, probably through updates. Some actions spawned hundreds of DB workers and the CPU would be stuck at 100%

foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml on 21 Nov 22:20 collapse

Gonna check